V-1 Buzzbomb: A Technical Breakdown of the Vengeance Weapon

I'm 20 years Air Force as was my dad. I have a military history minor and even taught military history to ROTC cadets at the University of Missouri. I found this information and presentation outstanding. I learned so much. About 80% of this video was new to me. Excellent job!

This man is an excellent instructor. I’ve lived with ADHD my entire life. And he’s got my attention from start to finish. If. I had more teachers like him in school I might have learned something 👍🏾

This man deserves an award for being able to describe the V-1 in surch detail that's actually both informative and entertaining. I feel like I could actually build one based on such detail. Its sad that so many lives had to be lost over these killing machines.

Fascinating weapon. There's more to it than I expected. 👍

Excellent talk demystifying a historically important subject.

An excellent presentation of a device far more sophisticated than I thought! Thankyou.

Just incredible! These things fell on my grandparents in London...... I'm sure they didn't realise the impeccable engineering that went into this! 😮

This is an extremely interesting and informative video! It's incredible they were able to make about 30,000 of these in the last year of the war. About 8,000 landed on England and Belgium.

at 5:30, I’m pretty sure the wooden sphere does NOT “dampen” magnetic interference at all. Rather, it’s made of wood so as to not CREATE interference with the compass. Any nonferrous material would have sufficed, but wood was probably more available than other strategic materials.

I am old enough to remember those things. We lived in a western suburb of London The newspapers reported on them and printed three views, So when I saw one I recognised what it was. I would guess it was at about 1500 feet and I was about a half mile from its course. After that, I might have seen about a half dozen. They just kept on to out of sight over the north horizon. They would keep on until the motor quit and then a few seconds after would hit the ground and explode. But there was one that came down maybe a half mile from me. I was taking a crap at the moment and this one was different. I heard it coming The engine did not quit.But suddenly the noise of the motor went up in pitch and volume. All I could do was, well just to tense and wait. About a half mile away was Duke somebodies mansion in the middle of his biggish park, The Bomb impacted just inside the wall of the park. This was a good place, far enough from the dukes place and inside his high brick wall. There was a public road on the outside of that and outside of that the West Middlesex hospital, so it did not hurt anybody or do any damage. To this day I sometimes hear a diesel bus that remindes me of the Buzz bombs noise.

Amazing engineering from 80 years ago ! Where could humanity be presently if this talent had been used for constructive purposes ?

The Germans certainly loved to use new methods to attack an enemy. Simple machine yet some very clever mechanisms built in. Very good video of this revolutionary and effective weapon.

Thank you, That is the most in depth technical description of the V-1 operation I have heard in my 60+ years.

The pulse jets were acoustically tuned and that technology was developed for two cycle engines by MZ in E. Germany after the war. They did the first resonance tuned exhaust which vastly increased two stroke power. Toured the Air Zoo several years ago with a friend who lived in KZoo. Really well done place. If you're in the neighborhood there's also a great car museum nearby, the Gilmore.

The yanks never suffered the impact of these. They werent called buzz bombs here,we called them doodlebugs.

As all the comments below say, excellent. I read that the Germans realised the sudden cut of the engine gave people a few seconds to take cover. They modified the system so the engine ran until impact. German spies who had been captured and turned were used to misreport the V1s landing in the west of London. The Germans altered the counter so many bombs fell short of the populated areas. The new proximity fuse saved countless lives. “On the last day of large-scale attacks only 4 Of 104 bombs succeeded in reaching their target. Some of the 100 destroyed are credited to the Royal Air Force and to the barrage balloons, but the majority of the V-1’s were victims of proximity-fuzed projectiles.”

Excellent!!! I have never thought that V1 was so complicated!!!

I‘m a German engineer in autonomous driving. It‘s so amazing to see how they developed an autonomous device without ANY microcontrollers / software 😲😲😆

A fascinating description of a complicated device that I thought (as you mentioned) was simply pointed in the desired direction, launched, and ran until it ran out of fuel. It's amazing what was done back then mechanically that today is all electronic. Everything from mechanical fire control "computers" for naval guns and artillery to the Norden bomb sights.

Fascinating, simple in concept but complex in detail. The Docent does a very good job of describing the V1.